Charlottesville Coffee Roasters

One of the things I appreciate about living in beautiful Charlottesville,
Virginia is the abundance of artisanal products that are high-quality and
produced locally. There’s a vibrant network of people making food, drink, and
physical goods: wineries, chocolate, art, blacksmithing, and much more. Many of
our local producers are recognized worldwide. As a newly minted coffee lover, I
also appreciate the variety and quality of coffee roasters in town and nearby.
Of course, we have to import the beans, but there’s much to the coffee story
after the beans are harvested. Here are some of my favorite local coffee
resources.

Mudhouse Coffee

Mudhouse is my favorite coffee in the entire world. It’s
a small local chain that started as a coffeehouse and expanded into roasting
because they were unhappy with lack of control over that part of their supply
chain. Their motto is beautiful coffees thoughtfully sourced and carefully
roasted for you and they now make available their coffees via subscription
online.

I love Mudhouse coffee for all the things they say about themselves, as well as
the fact that I prefer light- to medium-roasted coffee. They do light and medium
roasts better than anyone I know. Their espresso, Are You Gold, is the gold
standard for me. They’ve been recognized many times nationally and
internationally as well, most recently winning perhaps the most prestigious
award in the industry: Roast Magazine’s Roaster Of The
Year.

Trager Brothers

If you prefer dark roasts, perhaps Trager
Brothers will be your cup. They swing the pendulum
all the way to the other side, even boasting a roast called Dark As Dark,
which is exactly what it sounds like.

Red Rooster

Black Hand

Black Hand roasts from RVA, the local
abbreviation for Richmond, about an hour away. Their coffee is easy to find in
many grocery stores here.

Others

There really are too many local and regional roasters to list in detail. Here is
a summary of some of the selection available in grocery stores and coffee shops.
Many of these are personal favorites for me.

That last one is in Maine, but the people behind it have local ties and I’ve
gotten their coffee several times locally.

For those who are happy to pay a bit less and get coffee they can still feel
better about, there’s always the Allegro bulk coffee in Whole Foods, which I’ve
found is extremely fresh—one of the most important attributes of good coffee!

See Also

I'm Baron Schwartz, the founder and CEO of VividCortex. I am the author of High
Performance MySQL and lots of open-source software for performance analysis, monitoring, and system administration.
I contribute to various database communities such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB. More about me.